dkirschner's FEZ (PC)

[December 31, 2014 07:33:23 AM]

Fez oozes charm. I adore it. You play as Gomez, a little creature whose 2d world gets turned into something in between 2d and 3d. You see environments from one side as if they are 2d, but then you can rotate them to see each side in turn. So think of it like you are walking around a square house. You only see the side you are facing. You can walk around it to see the other sides. Anyway, all the environments are like this. Gomez has to traverse a giant world filled with probably a hundred individual areas collecting cubes. I’m not exactly sure what the cubes DO, as the game is light on formal narrative. You just collect them, and when you get enough, you can open locked doors, until you go into some weird dimension and wake up in your room again. Roll credits.

Fez is all about manipulating the screen to find and collect those cube bits. The puzzles are clever and fun. Some are quite challenging. There are vines and ladders that align when you rotate the screen just right, allowing you to climb higher, and platforms that rotate the world themselves when you stand on them. When I beat the game, I was nowhere near completing all the areas (finding all the cubes, secrets, treasure chests). I started a new game + and I think I can go try and finish collecting if I want, but I probably don’t.

The map is a pain to navigate. This was my only complaint with the game. Individual areas are connected by doors. Some areas will have 6 or 7 doors branching off, and some of those will have even more doors. The game is like an exponentially expanding universe. What happened to me is I was given the in-game goal of finding like 6 cubes to go through this one door in the beginning (then you need like 18, then 32). I just started exploring and didn’t return to that area until I had over 30 cubes. It's not that I didn't want to go back and unlock the door, but I just kept discovering new areas! When I finally returned, I simply unlocked every special door and unexpectedly beat the game 5 minutes later. Anyway, the map shows all these branches, but it doesn’t show which door connects to which area. There are literally like 100 areas, so it is a royal pain in the ass to try to return somewhere you have been before. There are a few nice teleportation devices, but the difficulty of revisiting areas killed my motivation to find more cube bits and secrets.

Find the secret with the QR code. My girlfriend came in when I found it, and I said “Is that a QR code?” She said “I think so” and pulled out her phone to scan it. We were both like “awesome.”